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history manipulation
make make install !-2 && !-1

File browser
Simple file browser with dmenu, ls, and xdg-open.

Searches $PATH for files using grep
Best to put it in a file somewhere in your path. (I call the file spath) #!/bin/bash IFS=:; find $PATH | grep $1 Usage: $ spath php

Extract .tar.lzma archive

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

List all symbolic links in current directory that matches regexp
Perl alternative to list symlinks with a clumsy regexp filter: place the regex instead of he example 'libxml' and end it with a wildchar to see the results (previous cd on dir). Is it possible change the '-l' test for '-d' and it will search for directories. [Same applies for -x and -X. See $(perldoc -f -x) for more tests]. I use it quite often when dealing with shared libraries...

change dinosaur poop into gold
if firefox is running the database is locked, so you need to copy the places.sqlite file temporarily somewhere to be able to query it...

Get your bash scripts to handle options (-h, --help etc) and spit out auto-formatted help or man page when asked!!
This will make your bash scripts better!! process-getopt is a wrapper around getopt(1) for bash that lets you define command line options (eg -h, --help) and descriptions through a single function call. These definitions are then used in runtime processing of command line options as well as in generating help and man pages. It also saves a little time in coding and in producing nicely formatted documentation. It is quite similar to GNU's argp in glibc for compiled languages and OptionParse for python. See: Linux Gazette article 162: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/162/hepple.html, http://sourceforge.net/projects/process-getopt, http://bhepple.freeshell.org/oddmuse/wiki.cgi/process-getopt

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
recursively traverse the directory structure from . down, look for string "oldstring" in all files, and replace it with "newstring", wherever found also: $ grep -rl oldstring . |xargs perl -pi~ -e 's/oldstring/newstring'

delete command line last word


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